The indefatigable Bathrobe has sent me a couple of good links I hereby share with you:
1) Arthur Waley’s “Notes on Translation” (The Atlantic, November 1958; archived) has lots of discussion of translations, both his and others; some samples:
Almost at the end of the Bhagavad Gita there is a passage of great power and beauty in which, instructed by the God, the warrior Arjuna at last overcomes ail his scruples. There is a war on, he is a soldier and must fight even though the enemy are his friends and kinsmen. This is what various standard translations make him say:
1. O Unfallen One! By your favour has my ignorance been destroyed, and I have gained memory (of my duties); I am (now) free from doubt; I shall nowdo (fight) as told by you!
2. Destroyed is my delusion; through Thy grace, O Achutya, knowledge is gained by me. I stand forth free from doubt. I will act according to Thy word.
3. My bewilderment has vanished away; I have gotten remembrance by Thy Grace, O NeverFalling. I stand free from doubt. I will do Thy word.
4. My bewilderment is destroyed; I have gained memory through thy favour, O stable one. I am established; my doubt is gone; I will do thy word.
In addition to being totally without rhythm No. 1 has the disadvantage of a pointless inversion of word order and of quite unnecessary explanations in brackets. If any reader has got as far as this in the poem and yet still needs to be told what it is that Arjuna now remembers and what it is that he proposes to do, he must be so exceptionally inattentive as not to be worth catering for. No. 2 is better; but as the title Achutya will convey nothing to the mind of the reader, it seems better to translate it, as the other three translators have done. And is there any point in trying to preserve, as all the translators do, the Sanskrit idiom “get memory” for “to remember”? In No. 3 the rhythm would be better without the “away” after “vanished,” and “away” adds nothing to the sense. But I think No. 3 (by Professor Barnett) is the best of the four. No. 4 is spoiled by “I am established,” which, though a correct etymological gloss on the original, is not a possible way of saying “I have taken my stand” — that is to say, “I am resolved.”
After examples from The Tale of Genji and a No play (“I must confess that when recently I read Sam Houston Brock’s translation of Sotoba Komachi […] I felt at once that my translation was hopelessly overladen and wordy and that it tried in a quite unwarrantable way to improve upon the original”), he goes on:
There is a wonderful passage in the Chinese novel Monkey where Tripitaka after his Illumination sees his discarded earthly body drifting downsteam: “Tripitaka stared at it in consternation. Monkey laughed. ‘Don’t be frightened, Master,’ he said, ‘that’s you.’ And Pigsy said, ‘It’s you, it’s you.’ Sandy clapped his hands. ‘It’s you, it’s you,’ he cried. The ferryman too joined in the chorus. ‘There you go,’ he cried. ‘My best congratulations.’ ” In her paraphrase of the book (1930) Helen Hayes says, “A dead body drifted by them, and the Master saw it with fear. But the Monkey, ever before him, said: ‘Master, do not be alarmed. It is none other than your own!’ The Pilot also rejoiced as he turned to say ‘This body was your own ! May you know joy!’ ”
Vital (in the original) is the repetition of the two simple words shih ni, “It’s you,” and if one gets bored with the repetition and represents the words as only having been spoken by two people, it seems to me that one spoils the whole passage. The second thing to note is that when the ferryman says “My best congratulations” (k’o ho) he is using the ordinary everyday formula of congratulation that one would use if one met an official who had had a rise, and that it is with whimsical intention that it is applied to Tripitaka’s advance from ordinary human status to Buddhahood. Helen Hayes’s “May you know joy!” so far from being a banal formula (which is what is required) is something that no one has ever said to anybody.
And he has a long account of Lin Shu, whom we talked about in 2017.
2) Keiko Nannichi, “Japan firms hit back at customer abuse with steps like body cams” (Asahi Shimbun, August 31), begins:
Companies big and small across Japan say instances of customer abuse have markedly increased with the cost of living crisis, forcing a range of measures to protect employees. […] The Asahi Shimbun recently surveyed 100 leading Japanese companies to ascertain what they are doing to tackle the issue. Eighty-seven said they are either taking measures, or are planning to take steps, against “kasu-hara” customer harassment.
Bathrobe says: “I found it a very confusing usage. I would have thought customer harassment (kasuhara, in typical Japanese style) would refer to harassment OF customers, not BY customers.” Thoughts?
Well, police harassment is harassment by the police. I think “class of people” “noun referring to the action or a transitive verb” can work either way.
I agree w/ Jerry F., and examples of inconsistency with a given “noun referring to the action” are legion. Here, what would the alternative to “customer harassment” be? “Employee harassment” would be rather ambiguous, even if were thought clear that employees were the harassees, as to whether the employees were being harassed by customers or by management.
Obviously the Japanese kasu-hara doesn’t need to match up etymologically with an English compound noun that is actually idiomatic or cromulent in English. The Japanese are fully capable of coining their own ESL compound nouns and then borrowing them back into their own language.
I just wanted to know how steps were like body cams.
I was curious about how modern translators of the Gita dealt with that verse (18.73). Fortunately GBooks exposes the following. FWIW,
Eknath Easwaran (1985):
Stephen Mitchell (1988):
Georg Feuerstein (2011):
(Two footnotes attached to the latter. The original is there too, in Devanāgarī and romanized.)
I found these through a brief guide to Gita translations, whose approach I like.
In case my characterization of those compounds confused anyone, it should be “class of people” “action of a transitive verb”. And “class of people” is probably too restrictive.
what would the alternative to “customer harassment” be? “Employee harassment” …
Yes-ish. As families are getting squeezed financially in NZ, some are acting abusive towards social workers/counter clerks at Work and Income offices. That’s described as “staff harassment”/abuse.
police harassment is harassment by the police
I’m not so sure of that. If in a rowdy demonstration in (say) Berlin today the crowd are shoving against the police line, egging them on to (over)react. Is that police harassment? When a cop eventually loses their cool and throws a punch in response, then what?
It seems there is no hard and fast rule, except that the sides of the harassment are assumed to be the more familiar ones. But sometimes men bite dogs, and in some circumstances it turns out that they do it regularly.
With some googling, you can find “teacher harassment” used by some to describe harassment perpetrated by teachers (generally against students) and by others to describe harassment perpetrated against teachers (with a wider range of potential perps).
and I have gained memory (of my duties); I am (now) free from doubt; I shall nowdo (fight) as told by you!
Destroyed is [my] confusion [and] through your grace, O Acyuta, I have obtained recollection.
You know it’s a holy book when the brackets start showing up all over the translations.
(The KJV solution of italics is typographically more elegant, but less transparent – and less likely to survive copy-pasting )
When I read my aunt’s copy of the Bhagavad Gita, the Bulgarian translation used a weird through-Enghlish transliteration, with underdots for syllabic consonants and all. I think it worked mostly well.
I have no idea whether “teacher harassment” (as an isolated phrase) is meant to mean harassment by a teacher or harassment of a teacher. But, if the teacher is female, or male, yeah, you can guess. No-one dared talk back to my high school mathematics teacher, though. She’s great and we had coffee a few months ago. My chemistry teacher made actually impeded my understanding of chemistry, and may Satan have mercy on his soul. He harassed and humiliated me. On the gripping hand, my French teacher was quite nice, but incompetent. I think it was the curriculum, not her.
What struck me was how old-fashioned Waley’s comments sounded, despite being published in 1958 (just before the explosive 60s and 70s). Waley’s Genji is generally regarded as an Edwardian rewrite of the Japanese novel and thus not truly representing the flavour of the original. There have been a number of translations since, but I’ve never bought or read them — McCullough, Tyler, Washburn, and of course the execrable Seidensticker. (I omit the earlier Suematsu as an incomplete translation.) I don’t think Waley lived long enough to read the later translations, but I suspect he would have been unimpressed. Did any of them truly convey the real flavour of the Japanese?
what would the alternative to “customer harassment” be?
The difficulty for the writer/editor is not finding an unambiguous alternative but rather noticing in the first place that ambiguity exists. In this case “harassment by customers” vs “harassment of customers”. The latter is still ambiguous, but only to an uncooperative reader.
This is why pragmatics? is important. I have no idea how to interpret these kinds of phrases without a lot of cultural immersion, and even then.
‘Abuse’ is more fixed, I think – elder abuse, child abuse, animal abuse, even alcohol abuse are all abuse of that thing, not by that thing.
(‘Spousal abuse’ might be grammatically ambiguous without actually being ambiguous in meaning. And domestic abuse is not abuse of domestics. But as a general pattern…)
the crowd are shoving against the police line, egging them on to (over)react. Is that police harassment?
Provocation? Of police, not by police. Still potentially ambiguous without context.
I would say “alcohol abuse” is a bit different than “child abuse” because in the former the alcohol is not the victim in the situation (it’s more self-victimization via alcohol as the means) and one does not seek to prevent alcohol abuse for the alcohol’s benefit. This is, however, just a consequence of the fact that “to abuse” has various senses and the actual real-world role of the direct object varies depending on the sense.
Separately, the reference to the indefatigable Bathrobe made me realize that “defatigable” is one of those mysteriously missing morphemes, parallel to “couth” etc. If you look in the google books corpus you can find a non-zero, albeit small, number of hits, but many of them are false positives as an early 20th century parody of Kipling seems to have used ‘defatigable as a clipped form of indefatigable in a parody Just-So Story, with that text having been anthologized in multiple different scanned volumes in the corpus.
This made me realise that I hadn’t properly looked at the parallel construction in Kusaal, where a “possessor”/predeterminer before a gerund can likewise represent either a subject or an object.
It actually seems to be much simpler in Kusaal.
Looking for predetermined gerunds in the handily-searchable Bible translation, it seems that they are straightforwardly subjects with intransitive verbs but objects with transitive verbs:
Nidib la daa gur Zakaria yiib na.
people the TENSE watch Zechariah coming.out hither
“The people were watching for Zechariah to come out.”
nɔki ba sʋ’ʋsi keŋi niŋ dap la kʋʋb diin
take their knives.LINKER go.LINKER do men the killing thoroughly
“took their swords and went to kill off the men”
There’s a systematic not-really-exception where the gerund is the second element of a compound, the first element representing a generic object:
o sid kulig
her husband marrying
“her wedding”
where the orthography unhelpfully conceals the fact that sid kulig is actually a compound noun.
Incidentally, the second example shows a periphrasis with “do” and a gerund, a construnction which John McWhorter asserts is virtually confined to English and Brythonic … clearly the Welsh substratum has struck again.
One can have almost endless fun with children and alcohol (it is recommended that the less experienced keep the two apart), but one must avoid overdoing it.
Some examples of proper use of children are
1. Giving them a jockeyback and shouting “low bridge” whilst racing through a doorway;
2. Taking them to the sweet shop or ice cream parlour when it is closed;
3. Alternatively, encouraging them to eat sweets until they are very ill (mixing some candied laxatives in will ensure an unforgettable experience).
Apart from giving one a good laugh, such experiences teach children valuable life lessons.
As for alcohol, the trick is to remember that anything done under its influence DOES NOT COUNT, especially unfortunate collocations when one is doing one’s best to drive (or walk) home. Therefore a small amount is sufficient to ensure a pleasant evening (or morning, if one must).
“alcohol abuse” is a bit different than “child abuse”
The “Misuse of Drugs” Acts (1971 UK and 1977 Irl) use “misuse” rather than “abuse”, I guess in a vain effort to preserve a Useful Distinction.
A sort-of-ambiguous “abuse”:
Hah. Spoke too soon about Kusaal:
ka fʋ namisʋg gaad ala
and your persecution pass thus
“and so your persecution [of me] has mounted up”
says Job to God, while
Zugsɔb la nyɛ fʋ namisʋg la
Lord the see your persecution the
“The Lord has seen your persecution [by Sarai]”
says God to Hagar.
Namisʋg is the gerund of namis. But namis is a labile verb, meaning both “suffer” and “make suffer” … so there is an obvious epicycle to apply here.
OK: tʋ’ “insult, abuse” is not labile, and has the gerund tʋ’ʋd. Mostly, a predeterminer of this represents the subject, not object*:
ka kɛ ka ba tʋ’ʋd la lɛbi ba zutin
and let and their abuse the turn their heads.at
“make their abuse return upon their heads”
So my generalisation was invalid.
I think what’s going on there is that the gerund tʋ’ʋd has actually extended its semantic range from “abstract action of abusing someone” to “abusive speech”, a kind of concretisation. (In the same way as diib, formally the gerund of di “eat”, is actually the normal word for “food.”)
Dunno if this has any analogue in English.
It occurs to me that some of the English ambiguous examples are not ambiguous in speech, because they differ in stress:
“police HARRasment”, where “police” is a modifying, quasi-adjectival, use of the noun, and the pattern is like “sexual HARRassment”
“poLICE harrassment”, where “police” represents the object of “harrass”, and the pattern is like “WIFE battering”, “ELDER abuse.”
English being English, if there really is such a systematic contrast here, it would get overridden by contrastive focus stress “no, poLICE harrassment, not MILitary harrassment” and perhaps by the “BLACKbird” tendency to stress fixed compounds on the first element.**
* Though Naden’s dictionary has the proverb
Onɛ kumis na’ab tʋ’ʋdɛ, onɛ tʋ’ o.
he.who proclaim chief abuse, he.who abuse him
“The one who reported that the chief has been abused is the one who abused him.”
reflecting (I think) the ancient African wisdom that if you’re publicly engaging with your opponent’s arguments, you may just helping him to air his obnoxious views.
** Prophylactic epicycles.
Putting first-syllable stress on “harassment” is Foreign, and not the way it is pronounced in Proper American. Except occasionally by those who were misinformed in childhood that the Foreign Way was the Correct Way. I was myself so misinformed circa 1980, in a “Homer nods” lapse into bogus prescriptivism by one of the otherwise most wonderful teachers I ever had (1927-2022).
I must admit that I am, in fact, Foreign. (“On the Internet, nobody can tell that you’re an energy being from a parallel dimension.”)
However, I think my argument will survive a Colonial transposition to “haRASSment.” I am prepared to make even this concession in the interests of Truth.
Initial-syllable “harassment” in US broadcast media came into vogue in the aftermath of the Clarence Thomas hearings in the ’90s. My guess is that announcers wanted the topic to be treated seriously and didn’t want any possibility of a lowbrow suggestion of “ass”.
I say “haRASSment”, but I don’t know if I’m Foreign or not. I will allow David to decide.
(As a verysmallJen I once came home from Sunday school and announced that I had Been A Foreign. It took quite a bit of questioning to establish that I had actually been acting as a thorn, in the parable of the sower. I remember nothing about this, but would still quite enjoy being a thorn…)
Classic! Did you have to stand in front of an audience in a thorn costume and say “I am a foreign”?
I think what’s going on there is that the gerund tʋ’ʋd has actually extended its semantic range from “abstract action of abusing someone” to “abusive speech”, a kind of concretisation. (In the same way as diib, formally the gerund of di “eat”, is actually the normal word for “food.”)
Dunno if this has any analogue in English.
“There’s good eating on one of those.” That’s the normal thing to say about tortoises on Discworld, anyway.
argh
That’s the most major aspect of English I was never taught. I even found out about “Christmas DAY” years after school (on John Wells’s blog actually). You’d think the fact that this pattern is impossible in German would lead to contrastive emphasis in teaching, as for so many other things, but no…
“He who smelt it dealt it”?
Immer der, der fragt…
@JF:
Yes, there are a good number of those. But I was more wondering if there was any correlation with whether a preceding dependent noun was construable as subject or object of the underlying finite verb. Desultory introspection suggests that it probably isn’t, really.
In Kusaal, diib “food” is actually pretty exceptional. Usually, if a root-stem noun with a concrete meaning is derived from a root-stem verb. it takes a different class suffix from the default (-b(ɔ) for two-mora stems.) But the waters are muddied by the fact that about one in five root-stem verbs is irregular in this respect anyway.
Also, the line between “abstract” and “concrete” can be a bit fuzzy. Zɔ “run” makes the gerund zɔɔg “action of running”, but that also means “race”, with a plural zɔɔs “races” and everything. Still not a tangible thing, but distinctly less abstract than plain “action of running.”
It doesn’t help, diagnostically, that Kusaal gerunds aren’t deeply integrated into the finite verb system in the way they are in English or Hausa, so sometimes it’s difficult to find textual evidence that a word really is usable as a fully abstract action noun at all.
“He who smelt it dealt it”?
Maybe. If so, it wouldn’t exclude my reading. necessarily. The riddle-like quality of Kusaal proverbs, which often makes it hard to deduce the actual meaning in context from the literal sense, is a feature not a bug in the culture: it makes it possible to make an unwelcome point without being confrontational, for example (a particularly valuable thing in a culture in which you do not contradict an elder – or your boss – to their face even if they’ve just made a momentary inadvertant mistake.) Apt deployment of proverbs is a valued speaking and social skill.
This seems to be very common more widely in Africa too.
One of the disappointing things about Naden’s Kusaal dictionary is that it does cite a lot of proverbs (good) but only gives you the literal meaning (bad.) Quite often, you end up wondering why anybody would say that at all.
From Catch-22: “Gimme eat!”… “Give everybody eat!”
a modifying, quasi-adjectival, use of the noun […] That’s the most major aspect of English I was never taught.
In Latin American bad English, more than anywhere else’s, I see the automatic rendering of de phrases into -’s, like “goat’s cheese”. I wonder if it’s taught as an easy-to-remember approximation.
You have it backwards, Y (we’ve been over this): first-syllable stress on HA-rass(-ment) was the traditional RP form. Second-syllable stress originated in the US sometime in the mid-20th century, nobody really knows why. The AHD’s usage panel had a 50/50 split on the question in 1987, hence the anxiety over pronunciation at the time of the Clarence Thomas hearings. But according to surveys by AHD and John Wells, that had no lasting effect, and the trend toward second-syllable stress reached 90% dominance in the usage panel by 2013. Geoff Lindsey reported a couple of years ago that first-syllable stress was obsolete in the UK as well (perhaps he meant, more precisely, obsolete among those much younger than David Eddyshaw).
(I’ve heard it both ways so much that I don’t even know how I say it anymore.)
… Sorry, I was rude. Y probably meant specifically *in US broadcast media* ca. 1991, though any vogues there ended up as only a blip in the larger trend.
So we have! But still, I see no contradiction with what I said, unless the initial-stress pronunciation was common in broadcast AmE before the Thomas hearings. I imagine it is and was relatively uniform among announcers, so if there was a shift, most of them would have shifted together.
That’s just a translation of the de that makes up for the general Romance lack of compound nouns. I’m talking about English having two intonationally distinct kinds of compound nouns; German only has one, the “BLACKbird”/”poLICE harassment” one.
Kusaal makes no formal distinction between the quasi-adjectival use of preceding nouns as modifiers and its possessive construction, but instead, it distinguishes, among preceding count-noun dependents, between referential nouns, which take class suffixes (so the construction is not actually a compound), from non-referential, which drop their class suffixes and thus do form a compound with the following head:
biig fuug “a child’s shirt” (a shirt belonging to some child)
bifuug “a child’s shirt, a children’s shirt” (perhaps worn by a small woman)
M mɔr wief zʋʋr.
“I have a horse’s tail” (entailing M mɔr wief “I have a horse”, unless this is some weird joint-ownership deal)
M mɔr widzʋʋr.
“I have a horsetail.” (but not necessarily the rest of a horse)
Mass nouns keep their class suffixes in both cases:
fuug dɔɔg “tent” (“cloth hut”, with fuug used as a mass noun “cloth” instead of as the count noun “shirt”)
salima bʋtiŋ “gold cup” versus salimpielig “white gold”, salimkuos “gold merchant.”
salima kuos would be a merchant made of gold.
So
salimkuos “GOLD merchant”
salima kuos “gold MERCHant”
It’s all perfectly simple.
Gimme eat
i hear behind this (and can’t recall the context in the book well enough to know if it supports or undermines it) גיב מיר עסן | gib mir esn [give me food], where the noun is the same as the citation form of the verb “eat”.
I can’t think of any Jewish characters in the novel, oddly. Certainly “de Coverley” isn’t. (His first name is always blanked out, presumably because none dare say it.)
Typographical note: I used   to indent the paragraphs. Where they start with a quotation mark, I used a shorter indentation,   , to effect hanging punctuation. A thin space might work better than but the exact result depends on the font anyway.
I think “Gib mir Essen” is a perfectly cromulent way to say “give me food” in standard German – it’s not a Yiddish-specific thing. Although I don’t know why the de Coverley character would be calquing standard German.
I think his speech is a caricature reflecting his character, gruff and curt.
ah! i really should reread Catch-22 again soon! and i wasn’t imagining the yiddish behind the character’s words, but behind heller’s (though i do think that behind the assyrian yohannan* behind the armenian yossarian, there lurks something specifically yiddish).
.
* who, as an actual historical personage, is unlikely to be related to wilde’s salome’s dance trophy.
i do think that behind the assyrian yohannan behind the armenian yossarian, there lurks something specifically yiddish
Indeed, how could there not…
On the Gita translations:
1. Is there anything in the original that justifies the mock-archaic thees and thous?
If not (as I guess from one of the later translations), why do translators do this? For me, reading that style is like dragging fingernails down a blackboard.
2. From the Waley article: “the tangles into which rhymers get themselves are sometimes almost incredible.”
I think of Dorothy Sayers’ translation of Dante’s divine comedy
Yet my instant reaction, having stumbled into the long excerpt first via the Recent Comments list, was that Gimme eat doesn’t work. I stopped reading at that point because it seemed weird, and I wanted to figure out why it was posted. It doesn’t sound gruff. It sounds ridiculous. If I hadn’t known his title and name I’d have thought he was a very recent immigrant or developmentally disabled.
It seems forced. If rozele is right, then a childhood memory may have misled Heller’s ear.
Heller works it into the narration shamelessly, too. He obviously found it funny. But the character is a caricature, like everyone else in the book.
I think “Gib mir Essen” is a perfectly cromulent way to say “give me food” in standard German
Cromulent is overstating it I think. Normal German would still be “Gib mir was zu essen”. “Gib mir Essen”, for me anyway, sounds either childishly demanding, jokey or maybe like Turkic/Slavic immigrant German depending on the context.
If you can give someone drink, why can’t you give them eat? It reads to me like a kind of pun on that.
@Julian:
The original is in Sanskrit, which was actually no longer anybody’s L1 by the likely date of composition. And the style is anything but colloquial. So mock-archaic is certainly justifiable logically, even if one might dislike it aesthetically.
On rhyme in translation: it’s inevitable it will lead to suboptimal individual word choices. It’s a trade-off: do that, or misrepresent the entire style of the original, if, like the Divine Comedy, it is in fact in elaborately rhymed verse. It depends what the purpose of your translation is. If all you want is a crib, translate it into prose.
Of course, the argument about word choices also applies to original works in rhymed verse. Managing the trade-offs is part of what makes a poet great. Dafydd ap Gwilym is so skillful at the end-rhymes, internal rhymes and multiple alliterations mandated by the cywydd form that he can delude you into thinking that his style is actually natural.
One might go on to argue that only great poets should translate rhymed (or any) poetry, but the supply of Edward FitzGeralds is, alas, too limited. And the great translator poets know very well that trying to translate a great poem accurately is a mug’s game. They actually create their own poems as images of the original instead. No use for cribbing.
@JeninEd: It is cromulent in current English to say “give me a drink” and “give me food and drink” but “give me drink” sounds quite odd. The google books ngram viewer shows frequency of that phrase steeply declining over the course of the 19th century and into the early 20th before stabilizing quite close to the x-axis around 1920. It’s in Shakespeare and so on, but I think it’s an archaism. Why the mass-noun sense of “drink” still works if you use the fixed phrase “food and drink” but not with “drink” on its own is not clear to me, but those seem to be the facts.
Managing the trade-offs is part of what makes a poet great.
Yes indeed. Pasternak does the technical stuff so brilliantly you don’t care whether the thing actually makes sense.
One might go on to argue that only great poets should translate rhymed (or any) poetry, but the supply of Edward FitzGeralds is, alas, too limited. And the great translator poets know very well that trying to translate a great poem accurately is a mug’s game. They actually create their own poems as images of the original instead. No use for cribbing.
Which leaves little room for less than great poets who try to find the best compromise between prosodic fidelity and semantic fidelity. However, that’s the kind of translation some of us enjoy writing.
“Drink” as a mass noun for “alcoholic beverages” is found in many contexts other than “food and drink”.
@JF:
Quite so. I wasn’t at all putting that forward as my own view.
Dorothy Sayers was no Dante. But who is? And the fact that she was not much cop as a poet (though without peer in the particular kind of detective story genre she worked in) does not of itself invalidate her decision to try for a verse translation. As I say, it depends on what the translation is for. There is not just one correct motive for translating a poem, and I do not at all think that only great poets have any business translating poetry.
I do think, though, that the really great poetry translations have something in common with great films made from major works of literature: the translator/adapter has not only to be a master in their own language/medium, but to have the self-confidence – or chutzpah – to take great liberties with the original.
There aren’t many examples of such translations. How could there be? But their possibility doesn’t at all mean that there is no place for any others.
@mollymooly: Yes, the mass sense of drink shows up all over the place. However (at least in American English), there are nonetheless places where it cannot appear, unlike food, which functions essentially only as a mass noun.
What Vanya said – “food” is indeed Essen, but “give me food” is just too unspecific or something.
So it’s really just that the list of English adjectives that happen to be identical with nouns (even German has a few) is simply much longer than I was taught? Or can every noun do that?
The latter, basically, modulo semantics and pragmatics.
CGEL gets quite shirty about those who describe e.g. “school” in “school dinner” as an “adjective”, as being a classic example of confusion between form and function.
Well, at least we can agree that “shirty” is an adjective. In some Foreign varieties of English, at least. (I only learned it from Foreigners when I was already in my early thirties, back when I spent a lot of time collaborating with English solicitors on various sometimes stressful assignments.)
@mollymooly: Brett has correctly stated what I meant but may have sounded vague about. And I am happy to be corrected on the current-idiomaticity-in-most-circles of “Gib mir Essen” by those with more relevant insight.
Or can every noun do that?
When an adjective is available, not so much. “Wood statue” is not horrible but not quite right either, since wooden is available.
A wood table is perhaps one for woodworking.
“Wooden” only blocks or semi-blocks “wood” used as a modifier for the sense “made out of wood,” not other senses. But a business that buys and sells wood is not actually made out of wood and thus can be a “wood wholesaler.” Perhaps also a lumber wholesaler (or timber wholesaler, esp.outside North America), but you can find idiomatic-looking online hits for wood wholesaler so “lumber” does not completely displace it in the context of “wood considered as an article of commerce.”
@David Marjanović: Attributive use of nouns in English is the subject of today’s Language Log post, although there it is the weirder situation of “a noun used as an adjective used as an adverb.” (But I know you still read Language Log, at least sometimes, so you may already have seen this.)
darting back to DE on rhyme in translation, just so i can throw some more appreciation in josie giles’ direction. her latest is an appreciation of donnchadh mac an t-saoir’s Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain (a new poem to me, since i’ve read almost none of the gaelic classics in any language, and none in the original), the mountain that it praises, the ceòl mòr form, and formal poetry more generally, and including at the end some lines from her in-process scots translation, that “tries to keep to as many of the formal constraints as possible. It’s daft, mad, delightful work.”
“Shirty” is alive and well in Australian English. It’s basically a euphemism for “shitty” (in one of its senses), in my understanding.
I hadn’t, so thanks! I only see the headlines in the sidebar of Jabal al-Lughat, and didn’t find that one interesting enough to click on… I’ve seen that phenomenon before; it’s runaway noun incorporation.
Best sentence: “Donnchadh Bàn is the apotheosis of a technique in the same way MF Doom is.” I’ve never heard of MF Doom (a magnificent name to begin with), but I’m going to search YouTube…!
“Surprise”, here, is just a noun.
This all comes about because the gerund in English is thoroughly incorporated into the finite verb system.
Being a noun, a gerund can be modified by a preceding noun: e.g. “comfort shopping.” (“Shopping for the comfort it may provide.”)
The stress is on the first noun, even if this does not represent the object of the underlying verb: COMfort shopping. As this is also the pattern for actual compounds, it’s natural enough to reanalyse this as [comfort-shop]ping, and to extract a regular verb “comfort-shop” from it. “When I’m upset, I comfort-shop.”
That’s nonstandard. But you actually could recast this by saying that English noun-verb compound verbs (with some exceptions*) have an aspect restriction: specifically, they are restricted to the progressive aspect.
“I’m window-cleaning” is fine in standard speech.
“I was window-cleaning” likewise.
“I window-clean” is not.
“I window-cleaned” is also incromulent.
BUT: headlinese regularly substitutes non-progressive for progressive to save space.
“The mountain route is surprise-reopening after years” is clunky and awkward but grammatical in standard English. It’s got mechanically deprogressified (reactionated?) to form the actual, very peculiar, headline.
* Quite a few exceptions, and rising. If English survives as a spoken language, it may well develop fully productive noun incorporation.
When an adjective is available, not so much
That kind of restriction on the syntactic flexibility of particular lexemes is common, of course.
In Kusaal, adjectives can only be used predicatively if there is no cognate stative verb expressing that meaning:
Li anɛ pielig.
it be.FOCUS white
“It is white.”
but not
*Li anɛ tɔɔg.
it be.FOCUS bitter
Instead, you have to say
Li tɔi.
it be.bitter
“It is bitter.”
runaway noun incorporation.
There’s also adjective incorporation. “In each class, we’ll free-write, play games, and use short, fun exercises to move our pens and minds.” (It’s not quite true that only an English teacher would use a hyphen there, since J.W. and I are not English teachers.)
I feel that there’s one with “through-“, but I can’t think of it.
Kusaal is actually remarkably like English or German in the ability to stack up nouns as premodifiers of other nouns.
For example, the Bible version translates “Passover” as
Kum Maliak Gaadʋg malʋŋ
death angel passing sacrifice
In principle, there’s no limit to this. For example, you can say
yiiga Kum Maliak Gaadʋg malʋŋ diib la
firstly death angel passing sacrifice food the
“the first Passover meal”
But Kusaal doesn’t do noun incorporation into verbs, unlike all these polysynthetic European languages.
English doesn’t nounincorporate.
You were noun-incorporating just then!
(I’m just troubleshooting your argument here.)
…because the gerund happens to be identical to the present participle, it doesn’t sound wrong… no new word forms needed to be created to make this possible.
That kind of thing feels understudied to me, but in any case it happens very often.
The gerund and present participle are always identical in English. CGEL classifies them as one form with two (or more) functions.
There’s actually a parallel of sorts in Hausa to all this. Hausa “progressive” aspects are, as in English, formed with an auxiliary before a deverbal noun – a gerund, in fact. If you add an object, the verb-object construction is just the same as the Hausa noun-modifying nominal construction X n/r Y, which usually can be paraphrased “X of Y”:
Yana harbin nama.
“He is hunting wild animals.” (harbi is the verbal noun of harba “hunt.”)
Ka ji ko? “Do you understand?” (perfective aspect; ko is “or”)
Kina jin Hausa? “Do you understand Hausa?”
These verbal nouns are masculine; the n is the same masculine-gender linker as farin wata “new moon” (fari “white”: adjectives usually precede their nouns in this construction, just to confuse learners.)
Closer to home: Welsh.
Welais i hi.
saw I her
“I saw her.”
Wy’n ei gweld.
I.am N her seeing
“I see her.”
where ei is the 3rd sg possessive pronoun.
Lots of languages do something like this to make present tenses or imperfective aspects or whatever. Probably explains some split ergative systems, although that has also worked the other way round, as in Indic.
(The remarkably simple – compared with the rest of Oti-Volta – Western Oti-Volta system of just adding -da to the verb stem to make the imperfective probably arose from predicative forms of deverbal adjectives coopted into regular verb conjugation.)
(I’m just troubleshooting your argument here.)
Also, I never jokemake.
In fact, what I’m suggesting is that it’s precisely the English gerund/participle conflation which has enabled this pseudo-incorporation – which tips over into real aspect-unconstrained incorporation in very informal style, and in some lexicalised cases even in formal style.
Yes. I gave up trying to work “someone trying to slap me with the CGEL” into the comment.
(What does it weigh? 5 kg?)
My Welsh examples reminded me that one of the theories of the origin of the elaborate agglutinative inflection of Bantu verbs, where the object prefix follows tense prefixes etc and appears just before the verb stem, as in Swahili
Tulikuona
we.past.you.see.INDICATIVE
“We saw you.”
is that the whole chain of prefixes derives historically from a SVO-pattern auxiliary verb with subject and object pronouns, and the rest of the verbal complex was once some kind of noun.
I’m not sold on this, myself, though it’s a neat idea. There are SOV languages in “Gur”, and at least one Bantu SOV language. The Ijaw languages are SOV too, though it seems only to be Greenbergian inertia that makes people think they are actually related to Volta-Congo. They’re in the neighbourhood, though. Sprachbund!
And Oti-Volta is pretty representative of West African languages in being SVO but having a string of tense/aspect/polarity/mood proclitic particles just before the verb. The Eastern Oti-Volta languages even put object pronouns directly before the verb after all the other proclitics, which is pretty like the Bantu prefix order altogether.
And a perfective verbal suffix can be reconstructed to proto-Bantu. There are languages where the verb flexion is all on an auxiliary except for tense or aspect, which is still marked on the gerund-or-whatever that goes with the auxiliary. Even so …
I think I need to learn one of these languages to understand this. The level of abstraction is too high for my pedestrian brain.
English doesn’t nounincorporate.
I think you mean “English is nonnounincorporating.”
@DE: I completely agree different translations are appropriate for different purposes. And that achievements like Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat are few.
I once saw a copy in a bookshop: it was very fat, extremely expensive (unaffordable), and one of the worst bound books I have ever seen – it was obvious that it would fall apart after just a short time. I wonder if all the library copies had to be rebound.
Amazon lists it at 2.5 kilos.
My own copy of CGEL is pretty robust and has lasted for years. I suspect that it weighs more than 2.5 kilos, too, but I’m currently unable to check. I don’t remember it being tremendously expensive for an academic hardback book, not that that’s saying much.
I wonder if Cambridge University Press has gone the way of Oxford and taken to producing crappy “perfect-bound” reissues of works still in print, while shamelessly jacking up the price? Unfortunately, that seems all too likely.
There is a usable pdf version out there.
I’ve just had a chance to read Whaley’s piece, which is very good. I particularly liked this comment: ““Masterpieces” were not always masterpieces and may at any minute cease to be so.”
I, too, have only just read it, and I very much agree. (I see that Waley makes the point about the various different objectives of translations right at the start.)
The part about Lin Shu is particulary interesting.
That, of course, should be Waley, not Whaley… I blame whales being on the brain since they’re soi popular to show in baby books.